Category: Exhibitions

Galleries and Museums and other spaces.

ArtSlant: Virtue in De-Virtualizing

Joseph DeLappe: Screen Shot (curated by Gordon Laurin)

Where Where Art Space, No. 319-1, East End Art Zone A, Caochangdi Village, Chaoyang District, Beijing

9 – 31 July, 2011

Combat is a staple for ingredient for all types of gaming and the urge to realism in virtual recreations of real-life battlefields has become an extensive sub-genre of the online gaming experience. These virtual fields of glory play on exercises of strategy and coordination to the extent that they are equally useful as training and recruitment tools for the military, teaching skills and attitudes that have real-world implications and applications.

Over the last month American artist Joseph DeLappe has been resident at Beijing’s Where Where Space, and the show Screen Shot presented the results of his time here. DeLappe has a long history of working in the digital realm and this show presents a series of new drawings, photographs and a video in part based on his ongoing performance Dead-in-Iraq. Dead-in-Iraq is the artist’s intervention in the freely downloadable US Army recruiting game America’s Army. DeLappe enters the game in the character of an American soldier, but refusing to take part in the battles. When he witnesses another player killed by enemy- (and one assumes, given the claims to realism, also friendly-) fire, the artist uses the in-game chat system to post the name of a real-life soldier killed in Iraq as part of the American presence there.

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ArtSlant: Not Quite a Roast

Half Rabbit (Local Whispers 2): Maria Castro, Experimenter En Couleur, Leslie Deere, Felicity Ford, Yan Jun, Christian Krupa, Catherine Shakespeare Lane, Alex McLean, Christopher Moon, Ruan Qianrui, Neil Webb, Ron Wright

Platform China, No. 319-1, East End Art Zone A, Caochangdi Village, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100015, China

5 June – 3 July, 2011

The title Half Rabbit here refers to the fact that we are now half way through the Year of the Rabbit, in the Chinese calendar. The animal years represented in the Chinese zodiac run in 12-year sequences, so for anyone born in a “Rabbit” year, the current annual cycle is a particularly auspicious time. Following the custom of reading one’s prospects based when you are born, the theme for Half Rabbit attempted to address issues of identity and fortune.

This was planned to be the return section of Local Whispers, an exchange project between Audio Architecture in the UK and SubJam in China. The first part having taken place in January at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the follow-up show at Platform China was to have seen the British artists collaborate with their Chinese counterparts. These collaborative efforts are often promoted as a way to use cultural activities to improve relations between countries. But this does not easily happen without a suitable environment in which foster such a result, and how much it occurs in practice very much depends on local conditions and effective support from both ends.

As it happened, unforeseen circumstances complicated the return of this show to China, and although there was a strong group of artists and great potential, the divided nature of the title could equally refer to the half-fulfilled final product.

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ArtSlant: Noise and Context

The Sound of Nowhere

Various sites around Dongcheng District, Beijing

5 – 12 June, 2011

Like any art form, creative activity that involves sound has a relationship with the world as a production and with an audience as reception. Both relationships have different expectations and requirements for whatever might be termed “success.”

The often ephemeral form of sound work dictates that it must assert itself in a stronger way to ensure its reception as in some way distinct from the “distractions” it works within. The concert hall, for instance, not only provides a hermetic, purpose-built environment for the perception of sound, but—as with the gallery—it creates a psychological space devoted to sound, which prepares the audience to receive the material.

As visual art has its idealised environments in the white/grey/black cubes, and must negotiate new tactics of reception upon leaving those spaces, so sound encounters a potentially hostile, but promisingly productive terrain upon entering the outside world. This boundary between the sound work and the world is a fertile creative ground for the artist, on which the work can take any position, and which creates the relationship with the audience and their understanding of how the work fits into the environment. This might be described, referring back to visual arts, as its “framing,” which include not just the physical details of the environment, but the institutional structures around the pieces.

In the case of The Sound of Nowhere, the environment is made up of the collection of this particular set of pieces in a group show with this particular name and provenance; the (rather nicely designed) handout guiding the audience to the sites; the background information about the artists and works provided.

Sound’s ephemeral nature perhaps encourages me to focus on these “extraneous” details in the appreciation of the work. The organisers themselves stress “the processes of the search, discovery, listening to and/or taking in.” The works in The Sound of Nowhere are widely dispersed around the hutongs of Beijing’s Dongcheng District and work with these constraints and conditions as part of their being in the world.

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ArtSlant: What’s Left Out

Alibi 不在场 (curated by Wang Yifei)

Linda Gallery, 797 Street B Zone, 798 Art District, 2 Jiuxianqiao Lu, 100015 Beijing

4 June – 3 July, 2011

“Alibi,” the title in English of this group show at Linda Gallery in Beijing’s 798 Art District, seems so much more evocative than the Chinese title《不在场》which the essay by curator Wang Yifei translates as “Being Absent.” Although the adherence to the title seems a little weak at times, this show presents artists working with an absence of some sort. That being a very broad subject, the results take many forms and directions, and overall the show brings together an interesting selection of works, with some standout pieces.

Staying initially with the curator’s text, there are some points there that I think bear notice. Unsurprisingly, given where we are, the text does not delve too far into any of the contemporary social realities of “being absent.” Describing it in general terms as “like a conspiracy, an escape or a way of self-liberation.” To me this places the focus more on an individual’s agency in the matter and less on absence as a result of outside circumstances.

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